News from July 2013

Gold prices have been tumbling. But the ardent gold bulls have been hanging on. The most popular argument that these gold bulls have clung to has been that mining costs will create a floor for gold prices. The idea is that if gold continues to be below the cost of mining, then miners will stop […]

Senator Lindsey Graham has vowed to introduce legislation in September or October to authorize a military attack on Iran. “If nothing changes in Iran, come September, October, I will present a resolution that will authorize the use of military force to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb,” Graham told a “cheering” audience at a […]

With oil reserves divided between government and opposition, we discuss the role of natural resources in Syria’s war. The international demand for Syrian oil was once high but the global embargo has changed all that – now one of the country’s most invaluable assets is being squandered in the name of war. With all the […]

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results […]

Regardless of where we call home, the famous conservationist John Muir observed more than a century ago, “everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.” This week I saw both the epitome of this quote and a sharp […]

A fire has broken out on a blown-out Gulf of Mexico oil rig, the feds have confirmed. 44 workers had been evacuated from the rig and no injuries were reported. An out-of-control natural gas well off the Louisiana coast caught fire late Tuesday, hours after 44 workers were safely evacuated from the drilling rig following […]

As if ruptured pipelines, train explosions and drilling rig fires weren’t enough ways for oil to damage the environment, oil companies are now creating new types of disasters. For at least six weeks, thousands of barrels of tar sands oil have been bubbling up into the forest in Cold Lake, Alberta and neither the oil […]

Africa is becoming the top choice for North American oil companies looking to diversify, and the East African Rift is the hottest of the hot, with Kenya waiting on commercial viability, Angola and Ghana already on the road to rival Nigeria and two newcomers—Namibia and Zambia—where the doors have been thrown open for exploration. Getting […]

You and I consume; we are consumers. The global economy is set up to enable us to do what we innately want to do—buy, use, discard, and buy some more. If we do our job well, the economy thrives; if for some reason we fail at our task, the economy falters. The model of economic […]

Mother Jones has an article on geoengineering funding in the US – CIA Backs $630,000 Scientific Study on Controlling Global Climate. I think the title is overstating it a bit – geoengineering (in any of its myriad, crazed forms) isn’t really “controlling” the climate. The Central Intelligence Agency is funding a scientific study that will […]

Gasland 2, the sequel to Josh Fox’s documentary about the dangers of hydraulic fracturing for natural gas, introduces a frightening image. It’s not another money shot of tap water on fire, though the water well hose lit up by the owner of a multimillion dollar home in Parker County, Texas is a wonder. Nor is […]

Rows of parabolic mirrors at the Shams 1 plant in Abu Dhabi. Marwan Naamani/AFP/Getty Images Abu Dhabi, the most oil-rich of the United Arab Emirates, is now home to the world’s single-largest concentrated solar power plant. The 100-megawatt Shams 1 plant cost an estimated $750 million and is expected to provide electricity to 20,000 homes, […]

Like everyone else, I love Buzzfeed. My facebook feed is full of clever GIF-filled Buzzlead links with catchy headlines. That’s really the “point” of Buzzfeed – catchy headlines, highly linkable and sharable posts that bring in as many clicks, tweets, and eyeballs as possible. So while I was a little surprised to see a […]

The ancient practice of agriculture meets modern city as we explore groundbreaking farms in Japan, the US and Norway. Monocle Films visits the people bringing green growth to their thriving metropolises. Monocle

Detroit’s Motown legacy has put the spotlight on the vulnerability of the American car culture. Despite an oil shale boom and years of money printing US oil demand has hit a wall. Expenditure for oil as a percentage of GDP exceeded a critical threshold of 4% pa impacting on oil demand, vehicle kms traveled, the […]

A combination of oil and gas innovations and well-site cost cuts is rendering the long-vaunted U.S. rig count a less important oilfield indicator than the number of holes in the ground. So in keeping with the times, oilfield services company Baker Hughes Inc (BHI.N) is complementing the rig count it has tallied for more than […]

All the terabytes of information the professional investor is expected to master, or, at least, regurgitate in front of the committee in charge of their compensation, could really be reduced to two data series: 10-year interest rates in a major currency, and the price of oil. If some device could tell you what those would […]

Since Jun. 3, inhabitants of the village Zurawlow in Grabowiec district in southeastern Poland have been occupying a field in their locality where the U.S. company Chevron plans to drill for shale gas. The farmers’ resistance is just the latest blow to shale gas proponents in the country. Chevron, one of the world’s top five […]

A BP official who led the company before the 2010 incident in the Gulf of Mexico marked his return to the region in a $3.75 billion deal with Houston-based Apache. Apache seemingly said goodbye to the Gulf of Mexico in the deal, opting instead to focus its efforts onshore. Former BP Chief Executive John Browne […]

Guest post by Alexander Ac Given that City of Detroit has now officially filed for bankruptcy, it is worth to look at the bigger picture. Is the fate of once mighty city just a short pause on the way to further prosperity? Or is it rather a symptom of something bigger and more widespread regarding […]

As noted here a few days ago, the beloved “peak oil” hypothesis has gone poof, but if you’re an enviro-doomster, you’ve got to have peak-something to grab on to, because Malthus. Looks like the new peak obsession will be . . . water. Yes—the stuff that falls regularly from the sky, the bulk of which […]

The decision to shutter “The Oil Drum”, the leading website devoted to peak oil, has come to symbolize the end of an era – and sparked a furious debate about whether the theory was all along based on a fundamental mistake. The site’s authors and editors blamed the decision to archive it on the “scarcity […]

From the Hellfire Club to the Illuminati, from the Freemasons to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon (i.e., Knights Templar) – to that list add the Bilderberg Group and the Trilateral Commission, and you develop a persistent delusion (yes, a delusion, or maybe fantasy or wishful thinking) that the super-rich are […]

Hype around peak oil’s demise is premature, though you wouldn’t know that if you believed BBC misrepresentations Last Monday’s BBC News at Ten broadcast a report by science editor David Shukman arguing that concerns “about oil supplies running dry are receding.” Shukman interviewed a range of industry experts talking up the idea that a “peak” […]

Crude-oil futures were trading up in London Monday, with the U.S. benchmark light, sweet crude trading above Brent. At 0957 GMT, ICE Brent crude for September delivery was up 35 cents, or 0.3%, at $108.42 a barrel. Nymex crude for August delivery was up 55 cents, or 0.5%, at $108.60 a barrel. “These are happy […]

At the grocery cooperative nearest my home I can buy kale from California, grapes from Argentina, olive oil from Italy, miso from Japan, and apples from New Zealand. I can enjoy a diet that’s utterly dissociated from Vermont’s Champlain Valley where I live, one that renders my local climate, the character of the local soil […]

Harnessing the swift tides of the Pentland Firth, a waterway along Scotland’s Northern coast, could generate enough electricity to meet half of the country’s needs. Photo by Flickr user foxypar4 In extreme Northern Scotland, between the mainland and the Orkney Islands, lies the Pentland Firth, a roughly ten-mile-wide seaway between the North Sea and the […]